I posted yesterday about PEOPLE’s exclusive report that Brad Pitt spent New Year’s in Cabo San Lucas with Ines de Ramon. PEOPLE had no photos though – and they still don’t – but they were able to get the jump on the story without them. In fact, they had a 24-hour lead on the shots being published, eventually by Page Six, you can see them here.
So a pap agency gets world exclusive pictures of Brad and his new girlfriend in swimwear by the pool in Mexico. As you can imagine, these pictures don’t come cheap. The agency then shops them to various media outlets. Typically you can’t pass on paying for the photos but still run the story – even if PEOPLE had been offered to bid on the images, they wouldn’t have been able to decline paying for them while reporting on what is shown in the photographs. Obviously Page Six secured the deal and paid for the rights to run the pictures. So how did PEOPLE get their exclusive report out there a full day ahead?
We already established yesterday that it’s likely that PEOPLE was tipped off by a Pitt insider, conveniently deflecting from Babylon’s poor box office with a romantic distraction. But both publications, PEOPLE and Page Six, have been known to be friendly to Brad. And now the story of Brad and Ines’s New Year’s trip has been extended by a day, since Page Six has followed up PEOPLE’s initial story with visual confirmation. Not that Brad would ever, ever, ever endorse the tabloids’ preoccupation with his personal life.
